The damage from a coronal mass ejection could be devastating to the US economy, costing us billions of dollars per day and impacting US economic production for five to 16 months depending on where the blow strikes and how strong the geomagnetic storm is.

A new report on vulnerabilities in the US power grid sheds stark light on our ability to deal with certain kinds of threats. A coronal mass ejection of an equivalent magnitude to the one that hit the Earth in 1859 would cripple our infrastructure today, with some areas losing power for up to two years.

NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft, which arrived at Mars last month, has sent back its first images of the Red Planet’s atmosphere as it was battered by a large solar storm. These images are the first of their kind, providing us with information about Mars’ ozone layer, and the tenuous oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen coronas at the edge of Mars’ atmosphere. These coronas can tell us what the conditions on Mars might’ve been like over the last four billion years, detailing how the planet went from being warm and wet (and perfectly suited to harboring life), to the cold, dry, dusty sphere that it is today.

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